Friday, April 29, 2011

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Eric Eisnaugle and Mickey Mouse's voter registration

Bias 
Any trend in the collection, analysis, interpretation, publication or review of data that can lead to conclusions that are systematically different from the truth.
--J. A. Last, "A dictionary of epidemiology"

The issue:




The fact checkers:

Aaron Sharockman:  writer, researcher
John Bartosek:  editor


Analysis:

Sharockman and Bartosek have collaborated on a sensational example of selection bias.  Let's observe their method as they quote a series of claims by Florida state representative Eric Eisnaugle:
"We have seen allegations of fraud, (Florida Department of Law Enforcement) investigations. (We have seen) falsifying of hundreds of registrations, including the registration of an actor who was already deceased at the time. In another case, Mickey Mouse was registered to vote.

"In yet another case, hundreds or thousands ... of students were registered to vote without their knowledge after they simply signed a petition, having no idea that their information was then going to be turned around and used to register their names on the voter rolls here in Florida."
The claims are:
  • a deceased actor had a voter registration application falsified
  • a cartoon rodent was registered to vote
  • signers of a petition were registered to vote without their knowledge
As a matter of stated policy, PolitiFact tries to separate claims and grade them individually.  PolitiFact will presumably grade each of the claims separately.  Or maybe not so much:
Eisnaugle made three different fraud claims, and we plan to touch on each in this fact check to see if they're true. But for the sake of the Truth-O-Meter, we're going to home in on the line that stuck out because of the absurdity of it, if true: "Mickey Mouse was registered to vote."
PolitiFact chose the most potentially absurd of the three claims to position the needle of the "Truth-O-Meter."

What about the claims that don't count on the "Truth-O-Meter"?

PolitiFact:
The group workers turned in 1,400 cards, of which 888 were found to be fraudulent. Included among the fraudulent voter applications -- deceased actor Paul Newman.
That one sounds true.

PolitiFact:
The workers would have the students sign a petition to legalize marijuana or a petition urging stiffer sentences for child abusers. Then, workers would have students unknowingly fill out a second form registering them to vote as Republicans.
The claim about a third-party group registering students surreptitiously also sounds true.  Eisnaugle's not bad on the Meatloaf-O-Meter, even if the Mickey Mouse claim doesn't pan out.

And what of the Mickey Mouse claim?  Was Walt Disney's signature creation registered to vote in Florida?

It comes down to the meaning of "registered to vote."

When I read the PolitiFact story, I took "registered to vote" to mean that Mickey was eligible to walk up on election day, had he desired, and cast his vote.  Was my view prejudiced by the accompanying story?  Could be.  I can't say for sure.  What I do know is that when I listed to Eisnaugle speak, I took him to mean that Mickey had been registered in the same sense that Paul Newman had been registered--via the creation of a fraudulent voter registration application.

I encourage readers to conduct their own tests.  Download the video by clicking here and watch Eisnaugle speak at about the 2:28 mark (props to PolitiFact for providing the link even if the alternate interpretation was never considered in the story).

The context supports the interpretation scorned by PolitiFact.  All of it surrounding the Mickey Mouse example concerns the actions of third-party registration groups.

PolitiFact did not address the comments of Lyndsey Cruley, spokeswoman for Florida's House Republicans:
"In sum, although Rep. Eisnaugle’s remarks could be interpreted, if taken out of context, in two different ways, he clearly intended to demonstrate that some third-party registration organizations have committed fraudulent actions here in Florida."
Cruley's explanation fits the facts.  Why wouldn't PolitiFact acknowledge the point?

And if PolitiFact is narrowly focused on the truth of the potentially absurd registration of Mickey Mouse, then why does PolitiFact editorialize regarding the bill Eisnaugle was extolling?

PolitiFact:
What's worth noting is that, in all three stories Eisnaugle cited, the fraud was exposed. The only real impact was that students in 2004 were registered as Republicans when they wanted to be registered as something else. It's also worth noting that it's unclear how HB 1355 -- had it been part of election law -- would have altered any of the above three scenarios.
I suppose Eisnaugle should have used examples of unexposed fraud.  Though how he would know about unexposed fraud ought to cause its own set of suspicions.  That, in fact, is one of the reasons why bills such as the one in question may prove helpful.  Our system makes it pretty easy to hide fraud.  For example, felons may have illegally voted in Florida's elections.  How does one detect it other than by catching them in the act?

In the end, PolitiFact's editorializing misses the mark.  Eisnaugle did not claim that the examples he cited would have been altered with the bill in effect.  He cited the claim to silence the complaint that no problem with election fraud exists in Florida.


The grades:

Aaron Sharockman:  F
John Bartosek:  F

Flunk factors:  Ignoring the obvious charitable interpretation of Eisnaugle's statement, editorializing about Eisnaugle's point while disclaiming interest in Eisnaugle's point (not to mention missing the latter).  The selection bias problem is not specific to Sharockman and Bartosek.  That is a systemic problem.


Afters:

The insidious effects of the type of selection bias found in this PolitiFact story have their full effect when PolitiFact encourages readers to look at the collected statements about a person in order to develop an impression about the person.  Using Eisnaugle as an example, the reader of Eisnaugle's PolitiFact "report card" (they actually call it that!) would see a lone "False" rating.  Yet if PolitiFact had chosen either of the other two statements to rate, Eisnaugle would have a lone "True" rating.  Or if PolitiFact had rated all three, Eisnaugle could expect to have two "True" ratings and one "False" rating.

What good is a grade point average created under these types of conditions?

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Grading PolitiFact: Chris Hayes means the median

We interview impartial experts.
--About PolitiFact
After the article is edited, it is reviewed by a panel of at least three editors that determines the Truth-O-Meter ruling.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter


The issue:



The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor


Analysis:

It's risky exposing journalists to math.  Just sayin'.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

PolitiFlub: Reince Priebus and the tax burden

Unbelievable:
When Priebus says that "Americans will pay more in taxes in 2011 than they will spend on groceries, clothing and shelter combined," his statement is vague enough to be read either as an aggregate measurement (in which case he’d be correct) or a description of the patterns for individual Americans (in which case he’d likely be wrong more often than he’s right). On balance, we rate his statement Half True.
In other words, PolitiFact cares naught for the principle of charitable interpretation--unless perhaps as it can be wielded to ignore reasonable interpretations of statements by Democrats such as Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) or used in reverse on Republicans such as Grover Norquist.

The inconsistency is laughable.

Grading PolitiFact: Michele Bachmann and taxing the top 1 percent

The issue:




The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor


Analysis:

Remember the good old days when it was easy to tell what type of taxes a politician was talking about?  When Marcia Fudge said many large corporations pay no taxes at all, a journalist could simply assume that she was talking about income taxes and do a fact check based on that assumption.

Things are more complicated these days with evil Republicans in office.

Michele Bachmann appeared on NBC's "Today" show with Matt Lauer and stated that the top 1 percent of income earners pay 40 percent of all taxes.  That calls for the reverse assumption of the one made with respect to Fudge, the benevolent non-Republican.

PolitiFact:
"If that's on the table, then why shouldn't the burden be equally shared?" Lauer asked. "Why shouldn't we put some of that burden on the wealthy and corporations?"

Bachmann responded, "Well, remember, again, already the top 1 percent of income earners pay about 40 percent of all taxes into the federal government. So if you want to talk about fairness, the top 1 percent are paying 40 percent of all of the income."

We wondered whether she was right that "the top 1 percent of income earners pay about 40 percent of all taxes into the federal government."
In the bygone days of yore, that would be "40 percent of all income taxes into the federal government," or at least the interpretation would amount to the same thing.

Bachmann on video, for what it's worth:



PolitiFact:
So -- using 2007 numbers at least -- Bachmann is off by quite a bit. She’s even further off if you use an estimate for 2010 by the centrist to liberal Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, which pegs the share of all federal taxes for the top 1 percent at 22.7 percent.
If PolitiFact judges Bachmann by the cited 2007 numbers then Bachmann inflated the figure by just over 42 percent.

If PolitiFact judges Bachmann by the Brookings estimate for 2010, then Bachmann inflated the figure by just over 76 percent.

We can thus continue to build our picture of the PolitiMath theorem by noting that PolitiFact takes a range of error from 42 to 76 percent as a "False" numbers claim, setting aside for the moment the fact that the most important thing about a numbers claim is the underlying message.  If Bachmann's underlying message was that the top 1 percent pay much more than 1 percent of the total tax income for the U.S. then she's out of luck this time.  She's likewise out of luck if she misspoke.

PolitiFact:
Bachmann would have been right if she’d said, "the top 1 percent of income earners pay about 40 percent of all income taxes into the federal government." But she didn’t say that -- and even if she had, her decision to focus on income taxes, rather than looking at the whole federal tax picture, would have presented the numbers in such a way that wealthier Americans would look more heavily taxed than they are.
Likewise, Fudge would have been right if she'd said "There are corporations in this nation, some of the biggest corporations in this nation, who do not pay income taxes when they fail to show a profit after claiming their deductions."  Oh, wait.  PolitiFact rated Fudge "True" for her inaccurate statement and Bachmann "False" for hers.  That's some pretty impressive inconsistency.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

If, as PolitiFact's chief editor Bill Adair claims, the underlying message is the most important thing about a numbers claim, then I can flunk Jacobson and Hamilton for not making any noticeable effort to tease out Bachmann's underlying message.  Or maybe Jacobson and Hamilton did a purely brilliant job and I should criticize Adair for blowing hot air.

I'll stick with the former until either Adair relinquishes his post or posts changes in his edicts regarding numbers claims.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Grading PolitiFact: Mike Pence and the Ryan plan for Medicare

This review takes on PolitiFact's second attempt to rate Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) for a statement on ABC's "This Week."  Those curious about PolitiFact's first attempt can find a few details here.


The issue:

On the full page at PolitiFact, a "Barely True" graphic occurs just below the clipped material


The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor


Analysis:

It's worth touching on the correction notice that now heads the story:
Correction: This item was originally published at about noon on April 13, 2011, based on ABC's transcript of "This Week With Christiane Amanpour." Shortly afterward, Pence's press office notified us that the transcript text was wrong -- leaving out the words "kind of."  Listening to the exchange on video, we confirmed the error in our original ruling. As a result, we are republishing this item at about 6 p.m. on April 13 with the correct quote from Pence and have upgraded the ruling from False to Barely True.
Isn't it basic that a verbal statement should be verified audibly?  It is a fact-checking failure to rely on a flawed transcript.  At least the correction has PolitiFact shouldering slightly more responsibility than their earlier place-holding announcement (via FaceBook):  "removed Mike Pence item because he was misquoted in This Week transcript."  Taking Responsibility version: "removed Mike Pence item because we relied on a flawed transcript for the fact check item."  But that's water under the bridge.  On to the more immediate problem:
"House Republicans under Paul Ryan's leadership have offered a vision to put America back on a pathway toward a balanced budget," Pence said. "It deals with issues in entitlements. It reduces the national debt. For Americans 55 or older, we're not proposing a single change in Medicare... What we want to do for Americans under the age of 55 is make sure they can participate in the same kind of health plan that members of Congress do."

Pence’s final claim about Medicare drew a response from Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who was also on the show.

"That is not accurate," Van Hollen said. "Members of Congress have what is called a fair-share deal. We do not bear the entire risk of increased costs. They are asking seniors to bear risks (that) they are not asking themselves."
In the first paragraph featuring the quotation from Pence we have the claim we see in the headline as well as the source of the paraphrase--the things PolitiFact has already communicated as "Barely True."  The shift to Van Hollen introduces a second claim that appears to occupy PolitiFact's subsequent focus during the fact check process.  The second claim:
Pence replied, "Members of Congress have the same premium support system, Chris knows that."

We decided to see who was right by fact-checking Pence’s statement that future Medicare beneficiaries will be able to "participate in the same kind of health plan that members of Congress do."
As is so often the case, PolitiFact takes its first step with the wrong foot.

Van Hollen claims Pence's statement is inaccurate.  And he also claims--apparently in justification of his initial claim--that Congress does not bear the entire cost of premium hikes.  Van Hollen's reply to Pence is a bit of a red herring.  There is a difference between an insurance plan and an insurance benefit as provided by an employer.  Van Hollen tries to contradict Pence by conflating the two.  PolitiFact plays it Van Hollen's way. But in reality we have two claims from Pence, first that the next Medicare generation will be able to purchase plans like those Congress chooses, and second that the payment system for those plans is like that of Congress.

Writer Angie Drobnic Holan spends a number of paragraphs accurately describing the basics of Ryan's plan and stays in fair territory with the initial comparison:
Now let’s look at how whether proposal looks like what members of Congress can buy.

How the plan is like what members of Congress get. We contacted Pence’s office to ask about how the Ryan proposal is like what members of Congress get, and they pointed us to the fact that Medicare plans from private insurers will be required to comply with a benefits standard set by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, as do plans that cover members of Congress.

We should also note that seniors would be able to compare different plans and select from different insurance options, as members of Congress do. The government would pay part of premiums, as it does for members of Congress.
The similarity makes Pence look correct, though Drobnic displays a Van Hollenish tendency to lump the method of payment in with the plan itself.  Then comes the foul:
How the plan is not like what members of Congress get. First, the plans would be created specifically for Medicare beneficiaries on newly created Medicare health insurance exchanges. (Exchanges are virtual marketplaces where people can shop for insurance.)

Second, as Van Hollen pointed out, members of Congress are protected somewhat when health insurance companies raise their rates, through a formula he mentioned known as "Fair Share." Generally speaking, the government pays for 75 percent of the average of the health insurance plans it offers. If the overall plans increase in price, the government still pays 75 percent.
1)  PolitiFact's first point is irrelevant.  Creating something new does not automatically make it substantially dissimilar to the model. 

2)  The second point requires a supporting argument.  PolitiFact's supporting argument will not stand, as we shall see.

PolitiFact:
Federal support for premiums in Ryan’s plan, though, would not keep pace with medical inflation. Premium support instead would be pegged to the consumer price index, which historically lags health care costs.
This paragraph from PolitiFact is unusual coming from a journalist.  Why?  Because journalists tend not to make key statements of fact on their own.  They nearly always, by design, refer such statements to a trusted authority so that the reader doesn't have to place trust directly in the journalist.  Fortunately, PolitiFact provides lists of sources in company with each of its fact checks.

Time (blog by Kate Pickert):
The subsidies would increase at a rate indexed to inflation, which is growing much more slowly than health care costs.
 So Van Hollen is right!  But wait!

Fortune:
The 2012 budget replaces the voucher concept with "premium support payments" -- once again, modeled on the federal employees system -- that the government would pay directly to the insurance plan the enrollee chooses.
So Pence is right!  Or close, anyway.  But wait!

People who become eligible for Medicare in 2023 and subsequent years would receive a payment that was larger than $8,000 by an amount that reflected the increase in the consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) and the age of the enrollee. The premium support payments would increase in each year after initial eligibility by an amount that reflected both the increase in the CPI-U and the fact that enrollees in Medicare tend to be less healthy and require more costly health care as they age. (For example, projected net federal spending per capita for all people age 65 and older in traditional Medicare would be about $15,000 in 2022, CBO estimates, in comparison with about $8,000 for 65-year-olds.)
If the CBO is right then the others are wrong, but Pence is probably the closest.

How did Drobnic conclude that Time was correct?  Perhaps her fourth source, from the "Wonk Room" of the dependably liberal Think Progress swayed her to discount the CBO:
Ryan is constraining the rate of growth in Medicare by offering seniors a defined contribution, regardless of the rate of growth in health care costs. The federal government’s contribution in the FEHBP program, by contrast, reflects actual increases in premium levels. As the Office of Personnel Management describes it, the FEHBP formula “is known as the ‘Fair Share’ formula because it will maintain a consistent level of Government contributions, as a percentage of total program costs, regardless of which health plan enrollees elect.” The difference is that Ryan’s proposal provides seniors with a set amount of money that, in order to reach the kind of savings he’s advertising, would have to depreciates every successive year — even as health care costs increase.
Whatever the process, the story suffers for lack of an explanation.

Speaking of suffering, we have more rationalization from PolitiFact:
Our final point on how the plans differ may seem obvious to some, but we feel it’s important to mention: Members of Congress receive employer-based insurance. By definition, that means they receive a salary to help pay for their insurance. The base pay for members of Congress is currently $174,000.

Medicare beneficiaries, on the other hand, tend to make a lot less money, because most of them are retired. The median income for Medicare beneficiaries was $20,644 in 2010. And only 5 percent had incomes exceeding $82,695, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
This is just silly.  Pence said the new Medicare generation could buy insurance like that available to Congress, not that the insurance would be purchased by the government in whole or in part.  Van Hollen's red herring is to Angie Drobnic Holan as flowers are to Ferdinand the bull.

Hoodwinked by Van Hollen and mysteriously concluding that Ryan's premium supports are "pegged to the consumer price index," Drobnic's conclusion is predictable:
We should emphasize that Ryan’s Medicare proposal is only a broad outline right now, and there are many unanswered questions about it. But what we do know about it strikes us as fundamentally different from the kind of employer-provided health insurance that members of Congress receive. At a minimum, the premium supports will not keep pace with the historic record of rapidly increasing health care costs. Additionally, seniors make significantly less income than members of Congress and will likely not have the same options to buy more expensive plans. And, finally, they will not (have) the same protection against rising costs that "Fair Share" provides members of Congress. We rate Pence’s statement Barely True.
The conclusion is based squarely on two parts red herring and one part dubious assumption about the nature of Ryan's premium supports.  Importantly, the issue of premium supports is only relevant with respect to Pence's claim that "Congress has the same premium support system"--not at all the claim blaring in the PolitiFact headline.


The grades:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

PolitiFact's readers deserve to know how and with what level of confidence PolitiFact determined that Ryan's premium support system is pegged to the consumer price index.  The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.  Or so I've heard.


Afters:

I had intended to contrast a pair of epigraphs at the beginning of this item, one consisting of PolitiFact's self-statement of nonpartisanship and the second consisting of PolitiFact's burden of proof criterion ("People who make factual claims are accountable for their words and should be able to provide evidence to back them up").  But I ran into a problem because I can no longer find a statement of PolitiFact's non-partisanship on pages such as "About PolitiFact" (with the exception of PolitiFact Texas).  If the line has been scrubbed perhaps we can score one for truth in advertising.


April 15, 2011:  Rewrote point #1 after it was mysteriously eaten by Blogger's dog.   RIP the lovingly crafted baseball analogy.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

PolitiFlub: Mike Pence/Medicare/How deep the memory hole? (Updated x3)

PolitiFact screwed up again, and this time they realized it.

Unfortunately, they didn't realize it until after publishing.


So, how does PolitiFact react?  For now, the story is stuffed down the memory hole:

The URL above led to the page from which this image was cropped as of 4 p.m. on 4/13/2011.  PolitiFact may alter the content at a later time.

They don't know where it is? If there was no such thing as humor or hyperbole, that would rate a "Pants On Fire."

It will be interesting to see what part of their corrections policy PolitiFact uses or doesn't use in treating this latest gaffe. But I like the way that "This Week" gets the blame for posting an inaccurate transcript:


PolitiFact can't be expected to actually watch the segment to verify the accuracy of the transcript.  Can it?

I found a blog with portions of the story included.  If the blogger removes the material I've got a copy I can post.


Update:

As anticipated, a new version of the Pence story has appeared at the old URL, with no specific notice from PolitiFact regarding the changes made (other than the change in the "Truth-O-Meter" rating from "False" to "Barely True."

I've detected what may be a terminal flaw in the story concerning the contested issue of the proposed insurance subsidy.  The sources represent a he-said/she-said scenario and PolitiFact apparently chooses one side (the side disfavoring Pence) arbitrarily.  As a result, my next grading of PolitiFact will probably deal with this story.


Update 2:

Just imagine my amusement when I got yet another error message at PolitiFact only to find that Dick Cheney no longer features prominently.  Chances are somebody at PolitiFact read the post above, felt a little burning of the ears because of my charge that the message wasn't true and then figured that since Cheney was out of office for a couple of years that maybe it was time to update.


If only my serious criticisms would warrant that type of action.


Update 3:

No worries, Cheney fans.  PolitiFact hasn't let him retire yet.  And PolitiFact will still claim not to know where something is when they know perfectly well where it is.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Grading PoltiFact: Jon Kyl and Planned Parenthood's abortions

We don’t check opinions, and we recognize that in the world of speechmaking and political rhetoric, there is license for hyperbole.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:



The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

I can't recall any examples where PolitiFact graded "true" an example of hyperbole.  It may have happened.  I may have even read the story.  But I don't remember it if I did.   On with the show that is PolitiFact's treatment of a statement by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.):
Here’s a portion of what Kyl said on the floor:

"Everybody goes to clinics, to hospitals, to doctors, and so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."

We got many requests to fact-check his statement.
Bonus points to my gentle readers if they recall my critique of PolitiFact's selection process for allowing readers to determine which statements receive a fact check.  As I've said subsequently, PolitiFact's policies are a recipe for selection bias.  Sen. Kyl made a series of factual claims, any of which might have served as subject matter for fact checkers.  Yet the evidence suggests that the clamoring of readers directly led to this fact check.  What is that evidence?  Same day service!  Kyl made his statement late Friday morning, a little after 11 a.m.   PolitiFact published online just after 6 p.m.  That's a very rapid turnaround by PolitiFact standards.  Fact checks ordinarily take days.

Why the rush?  We'll look for clues in the story.

PolitiFact:
Planned Parenthood says the statistics are dramatically different -- that 90 percent of its services are preventive in nature, compared with 3 percent that are abortion-related.
The story goes on to transmit, in brief, Planned Parenthood's account of its services followed by an assessment:
We should note a few caveats.

First, we think many people would acknowledge a difference between providing an abortion and, say, handing out a pack of condoms or conducting a blood test. The former is a significant surgical procedure, whereas the latter are quick and inexpensive services. So Planned Parenthood’s use of "services" as its yardstick likely decreases abortion’s prominence compared to what other measurements would show. Using dollars spent or hours devoted to patient care would likely put abortion above 3 percent in the calculations.

Second, it’s worth noting that Planned Parenthood self-reported these numbers, although the group says each affiliate’s numbers are independently audited. (There is no single, national audit.) So we have no choice but to accept their accuracy more or less on faith.

Still, even with those caveats, we do think that Kyl has vastly overstated the share of abortions.
That, ladies and gentlemen, pretty much finishes the fact checking.  PolitiFact accepts the accuracy of Planned Parenthood's numbers "more or less on faith."  And that faith is based, in part, on the government audit system.  As I pointed out during a past review of PolitiFact, the government audit system is far from foolproof.

On the one hand we have an appalling degree of credulity exhibited by the fact check team.  On the other hand, is there any way at all to reconcile Kyl's statement with a sober assessment of Planned Parenthood's numbers?

A potential explanation came down the pipe around 3 p.m. on Friday:
We checked with Kyl’s office but did not hear back. However, a few hours after the speech, CNN anchor T.J. Holmes told viewers that the network had received a statement from Kyl’s office saying that the senator’s remark "was not intended to be a factual statement but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions in taxpayer dollars, does subsidize abortions."
The explanation from Kyl's office is the definition of hyperbole.  But PolitiFact ignores the interpretation of Kyl's statement as hyperbole, as the next paragraph shows:
The statistics from Planned Parenthood and the statement from Kyl's office make it clear that he erred by saying abortion counts for well over 90 percent of the group's services. We find his claim False.
Hyperbole is not an error.  It is a deliberate figure of speech.  In the best examples, the audience has little doubt that the speaker expects them to discount the literal numbers in favor of the underlying point.  Kyl's statement was arguably a maladroit attempt at hyperbole, perhaps to the point of suggesting that the explanation was an ad hoc justification.  But is the fact check fair if what might serve as an exculpatory explanation is taken instead as a confession of wrongdoing?  And is PolitiFact's claim of allowing license for hyperbole plausible in light of a case like this one?

PolitiFact appears to have placed itself at the disposal of news activists as a media marionette.  Consider the credulity required to overlook the following in Planned Parenthood's data (click image for enlarged view):

Note the  "Reversible Contraception Clients, Women**" with the associated number of services, 2,327,662.

Follow the asterisks:


Third down in the column:  "No method," with 10.5 percent of the reversible contraceptive services falling in that category.  I think if I had an interview with a Planned Parenthood spokesperson it might occur to me to ask in what sense "No Method" of birth control reasonably represents a service provided by Planned Parenthood.  And I'd be looking for an explanation of "Other/Unknown" (8.1 percent of reversible contraceptive services).  Planned Parenthood doesn't know what service it has provided as much as 8.1 percent of the time?

These are not small numbers.  "No method" accounts for about 2 percent of Planned Parenthood services compared to the 3 percent supposedly accounted for by abortion-related services.  And "Other/Unknown" accounts for another 189,000 services.

It might occur to a journalist that the Planned Parenthood numbers show some fairly obvious evidence of padding even aside from the dubious practice of weighting all services evenly regardless of cost (find an unfriendly interpretation here).

This is the shoddiest sort of journalism.  The attempt to check the facts was cursory at best.  PolitiFact again belied its claim of allowing license for hyperbole, in this case apparently not even giving serious consideration to the possibility Kyl was employing hyperbole.

Is literally 90 percent plus of Planned Parenthood's business abortion?  Certainly not, but the unfriendly estimates figure that it accounts for about a third of Planned Parenthood's revenue, a fact certainly under-emphasized by Planned Parenthood's numbers.  As hyperbole, Kyl's point was fair but potentially misleading.

Why the rush?  The best explanation for the urgency of this item seems to come from ideology.  It was important to PolitiFact to publish prior to the final negotiations over the government shutdown.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F


Afters:

Looks like a new feature for CSPAN video embeds--the ability to customize the beginning and end of the video.  So I'm giving it a try for the Kyl clip:



I'd have like better precision in choosing the start and end times, though that may be achievable using the html code.



April 14, 2011:  Replaced "PolitiFact's" with "Planned Parenthood's" in the next-to-last paragraph prior to the grades.  PolitiFact, so far as I know, does not abort human embryos or fetuses at all.  Hat tip to JD for catching the error for me.
April 26, 2011: Excised a pair of grammatically criminal commas.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Grading PolitiFact (Georgia): Herman Cain and the early objective of Planned Parenthood

We always try to get the original statement in its full context rather than an edited form that appeared in news stories.
About PolitiFact

The issue:




The fact checkers:

Willoughby Mariano:  writer, researcher
Jim Tharpe:  editor


Analysis:

Let's dive right in with PolitiFact's explanation of the issue:
"When Margaret Sanger - check my history - started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world," Cain said during a talk in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group.

"It's planned genocide," Cain added. He wants the U.S. Congress to yank funding for Planned Parenthood, which receives about $75 million a year to provide non-abortion health services.

Was Planned Parenthood founded to help kill unborn black babies?
Cain went on to talk about today's Planned Parenthood working to fulfill its "original mission," so it's probably fair to infer that Cain is, at minimum, linking the killing of black babies with that original mission.

The line about killing black babies prior to birth accounts for my agreement with PolitiFact on one aspect of Cain's claim:  The early incarnations of Planned Parenthood didn't do much to push abortion.  It was too controversial at the time.

But before we move on, please note that we do not have Cain's comment in its original context.  We have PolitiFact relying on a news account of Cain's speech.  PolitiFact claims that it "always" tries to work from an original version of a claim to allow consideration of the surrounding context.  If it isn't important to consider the surrounding context, then why assure readers that searching out the context is standard practice?  And if the original context is important, then shouldn't any fact check lacking the original context make special note of that missing feature?

In Cain's case, the original context is missing, and PolitiFact fails to emphasize the potential significance of missing material.

The ensuing fact check emphasizes that there is no good evidence that black babies were killed and that the evidence that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was personally racist is of the poorest quality.

I'm already on record supporting the former point.  But Sanger's personal beliefs are largely irrelevant to the implicit argument that Planned Parenthood has a history of targeting blacks.

The PolitiFact story offered a fleeting glimpse of the elephant in the room:
Eugenics was once a wildly popular theory that the human race can be improved through better breeding and genetics. It drew together backers as diverse as President Theodore Roosevelt and black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois.

At its best, the U.S. movement pushed for better prenatal care. At its worst, it enabled forced sterilization laws and let claims that blacks and immigrants were inferior to masquerade as science.

Sanger welcomed some of the movement’s more notorious leaders onto the board of a predecessor to Planned Parenthood.
The question any journalist should have sought to answer after a statement like that is why Sanger welcomed some of the most notorious leaders of the eugenics movement into leadership in her organization.

Dorothy Roberts summed up the relationship well in her essay "Margaret Sanger and the Racial Origins of the Birth Control Movement":
The eugenics movement supported Sanger's birth control clinics as a means of reaching groups whose high fertility rates were thought to threaten the nation's racial stock and culture.
"Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity," Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, editors, Duke University Press
Sanger herself was more directly concerned with the disastrous effects of a Malthusian population bomb.  British scholar Thomas Malthus, back in the 19th century, had theorized that exponential population growth led inexorably to an extinction or near-extinction disaster.  Sanger bought the idea.  But unlike the eugenicists who wanted to explicitly adjust racial demographics, Sanger primarily wanted fewer people generally rather than a smaller number of any particular race or set of races, though it is also true that she believed in the power of eugenics to better the human race as a whole by allowing poor genetic lines to die off.

By moving the emphasis to Sanger's personal beliefs, PolitiFact ends up presenting a whitewashed version of Planned Parenthood's history and a misleading evaluation of Cain's claim.  Cain, after all, claimed nothing about Sanger other than calling her the founder of Planned Parenthood.   As a result, aspects of the fact check such as the following miss the point:
But we found no evidence that Sanger advocated - privately or publicly - for anything even resembling the "genocide" of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferior.

Every academic PolitiFact Georgia consulted said that Cain’s claim is wrong.

"I have never run into any serious academic reference of Sanger or others wanting to ‘kill black babies,’" Indiana University professor Ruth Engs, a eugenics movement expert, told PolitiFact Georgia in an e-mail.
Engs at least extends her defense of Sanger to "others," but uselessly bases it on a lack of the desire to "kill black babies," which in turn obscures the varieties of racial motivation found in the ranks of the eugenicists who supported Sanger's birth control initiatives.

Despite pointing out Sanger's association with eugenicists, the PolitiFact Georgia team can scarcely imagine why eugenicists would want birth control for the undesirable population:
Really, calling the Negro Project a genocidal plot defies common sense. Why would Sanger try to destroy a race of people by giving them access to the very thing she thought could make life better?
Sanger probably wouldn't, but her eugenicist allies would.  Roberts succinctly fills the journalistic hole left by Mariano and Tharpe:
Even if the Negro Project did not intend to exterminate the black population, it facilitated the goals of eugenicists.  Eugenicists considered southern blacks to be especially unfit to breed on the basis of a theory of "selective migration," which held that the more intelligent blacks tended to migrate to the North, leaving the less intelligent ones behind.
Roberts goes on to note that North and South Carolina instituted state-run birth control initiatives while the use of contraceptives remained unlawful in enlightened Massachusetts. 

Sanger's view that fecundity resulted in poverty and thus lack of reproductive fitness was not a popular view among eugenicists.  The overtly racist eugenicists could see a benefit to giving contraceptives to an undesirable class of persons.  And the non-racist eugenicists most likely to ally with Sanger likewise saw a good result in limiting the population of the unfit:
These close allies of birth control held more rigidly deterministic views than Sanger did.  As Kevles notes, what distinguished these men from other social reformers was their firm belief that biology mattered.  In disparaging the racial prejudice of mainstream eugenics, they did not dispute its goals, only its methods.
Carole R. McCann, "Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945"
As with the lending practice of redlining, preventing the births of black children to a greater degree than preventing the births of others is not necessarily a racist practice.  And if Cain erred by referring to killing black babies, he was at least correct that Planned Parenthood's roots contain a concerted effort to reduce procreation by blacks, especially in the South.

Presumably the media experts at PolitiFact have no real knowledge of this, so we can't be surprised at the conclusion:
Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card. We rate it Pants on Fire.
Cain's claim was only ridiculous to the extent it is restricted to the method of limiting the reproduction of blacks.  The PolitiFact team exhibits difficulty in restricting its evaluation to that point and provides a distorted picture in the end.

And it's worth noting that calling Cain's claim a "cynical play of the race card" is a outright editorial judgment, rather than a check of the facts. 


The grades:

Willoughby Mariano:  F
Jim Tharpe:  F

If the original context is important then treat it that way.  Otherwise, revise the descriptions of PolitiFact's process.

It seems that fact checkers had a pair of facts they wanted to check ("Was Margaret Sanger a racist?" "Did Planned Parenthood kill babies fetuses back in the early days?") and used Herman Cain as their excuse to check those data points.  In the process, the validity of Cain's point about the unseemly origins of Planned Parenthood received short shrift.


Afters:

This fact check provides yet another example of PolitiFact's practical immunity from the standards it applies to others.  PolitiFact's "burden of proof" criterion allows PolitiFact to rule a statement "False" if the claimant fails to substantiate his claim.  Yet we're supposed to trust PolitiFact's ruling despite the apparent lack of a complete record of Cain's statement.

As well, one could note the lack of a strictly objective criterion for ridiculousness that would allow PolitiFact to distinguish between "False" and "Pants on Fire."

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Bill Maxwell tired of the namecalling

The title could say it all:

I'm not a conservative

Shocker!

But you don't really know that "conservative" is a bad word until Maxwell gets into it a bit further:
My white friends seek to rear their children in crime-free neighborhoods. I want black kids to grow up the same way. For wanting what is normal, I am condemned as a conservative and an enemy of black people.


Liberal whites I know read to their children and grandchildren and take them to museums and other venues of culture. Blacks should do the same for their children. For this belief, I am condemned as conservative.
Condemned as a conservative.  Hopefully Maxwell feels comfortable and accepted by his peers on the editorial board of the St. Petersburg Times.

Heh.

Our battle against extremism

Sen. Bill Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) apparently got the same Democratic Party memo that Sen. Chuck Schumer received.  The Democrats have committed to fighting the budget battle on the basis of Republican extremism.

Nelson let me know via campaign email:

Dear Bryan,

Let me bring you up to date on the government shutdown here in Washington. Thankfully, we've just seen common sense begin to triumph over right-wing extremism.
It took weeks of fighting, but we're beginning to get a spending deal that aims to be fair to everybody. The battle mainly has been against a group of right-wing extremists who tried to hold the federal government hostage in order to pass severe restrictions on women's health care.  But a last-minute compromise to avert a shutdown of the federal government occurred late Friday, because reasonable lawmakers were able to come together and trump the extremists.
As the chairman of a newly created Senate subcommittee charged with finding ways to reduce the deficit and create jobs, I will be in a position to work on a plan that's good for our country.
I believe workable solutions can be reached only when reasonable people work together. That now seems to be happening in the budget talks. We all agree the government has to live within its means. But to get compromise, we all also have to give up some things we may have wanted.
In the coming days and weeks, Congress still has a lot of work ahead to pass a long-term spending bill. But I believe the temporary agreement is a step in the right direction. At the end of the day, I'm confident that with your support we'll be able to adopt a plan for spending cuts that's fair - and keeps our economy moving in the right direction, too.
Sincerely,
Bill Nelson

Thanks for the update, Sen. Nelson. I'll redouble my efforts to retire you from the Senate. It isn't extreme to cut 100 billion from a budget that was $1.3 trillion in 2010 and rising (not that the budget deal would cut half that much). And if Planned Parenthood can't be cut then we ought to ask where we can make cuts.

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Another tale of two fact checks: Priebus & Pelosi

In fact checking, using a consistent set of standards represents one of the most important safeguards against ideological bias.

A recent set of fact checks from PolitiFact helps illustrate how the inconsistent application of standards reinforces the impression of ideological bias.

The first fact check, from April 6, 2011, featured the chairman of the Republican party, Reince Priebus (using a portion PolitiFact's quotation, ellipsis in the original):
"Under this president, he’s promised millions and millions of jobs. We’ve lost 26 million jobs, Meredith, since he’s been president. He promised under an $850 billion stimulus program that we’d be on a path to recovery. We’ll none of that has come true. … I think that pointing out a snail’s pace in the job (growth) numbers is not going to be enough to undo 26 million jobs that are lost, Meredith."
PolitiFact ruled Priebus' statement "Pants on Fire," as it was approximately ten times the actual number.

The second fact check, also from April 6, came from House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi:
"In one of the bills before us, 6 million seniors are deprived of meals – homebound seniors are deprived of meals," Pelosi said. "People ask us to find our common ground, the middle ground. Is middle ground 3 million seniors not receiving meals? I don’t think so. We’ve got to take this conversation from a debate about numbers and dollar figures and finding middle ground there, to the higher ground of national values. I don’t think the American people want any one of those 6 million people to lose their meals."
PolitiFact ruled Pelosi's claim "Half True" because the number of seniors missing meals would be far smaller than 6 million.  Pelosi's office said she misspoke, intending instead to refer to 6 million meals.  Since people eat every day and often more than once per day, the number of seniors missing meals certainly may have been overstated by a factor of 10 or greater.

The similarities:
  • A claim was repeated twice
  • The claim was inflated by approximately a factor of 10
  • The claim was made during a speaking engagement
  • PolitiFact story written by Louis Jacobson, edited by Martha Hamilton
The dissimilarities:
  • Pelosi's office provided an explanation for the misstatement, Priebus' office did not
  • Pelosi is a Democrat, Priebus a Republican
The unexplored additional similarity:
  • Both Priebus and Pelosi misspoke
This potential similarity comes with a caveat:  PolitiFact considered the possibility that Priebus misspoke:
Perhaps Priebus simply misspoke, or perhaps he misplaced a decimal point and ended up wrong by a factor of 10.
Under the assumption that the political affiliations of the subjects do not matter, it appears that Priebus could have warranted a "True" rating by communicating to PolitiFact that he misspoke and meant to refer to 2.6 million jobs lost rather than 26 million.

PolitiFact's problem may be more the consistent application of a faulty standard rather than inconsistent application of a proper standard.  PolitiFact places no emphasis on charitable interpretation, instead favoring a "burden of proof" standard that permits PolitiFact to conclude that a statement is false unless the party making the statement demonstrates otherwise.

Those of you who note that such a policy permits PolitiFact to present ratings as true despite lacking any proof of the finding--granting themselves an exception to the standard applied to others--have a good point.

Reince Priebus, promptly contact PolitiFact and let them know you meant 2.6 million jobs lost.

Then let's see if PolitiFact applies its standards consistently by boosting your rating up to "Half True."

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

The giant crowbar that brings government into your personal life

The Florida ACLU apparently thinks it's hit on an ingenious idea to keep the government out of ladies' reproductive decisions.

Treat your body like a business.  Incorporate your uterus.

I detect major backfire.

Consider the liberal take on the individual mandate for ObamaCare.  Liberal jurisprudence considers it obvious that the commerce clause permits federal government jurisdiction over even the decision not to purchase health insurance. 

Turn the uterus into a business and how does the government not have jurisdiction over the use of that business?  The decision to have sex, for example, has commercial repercussions for the insurance industry.  Pregnancies and STDs have impact on insurance risk.  The ways a woman conducts her uterine business will thus invite federal regulation.

Great idea, ACLU.  Maybe you should consider joining the cases challenging the individual mandate.

Monday, April 04, 2011

Vindication

I love it when circumstances make it look like I know what I'm talking about.

Today Fortune and ProPublica jointly published a story on the misreporting of General Electric's tax situation.  It has been widely reported--including at the illustrious fact-check site PolitiFact--that GE paid no U.S. income taxes.

I had earlier developed the strong suspicion that journalists were misusing the term "tax benefit," and today's story serves as a strong confirmation:
Those headlines are based on the story's third paragraph, which discusses GE's 2010 financial results. "Its American tax bill? None. In fact, GE claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion." That seems to say that GE is getting a tax refund for 2010 -- but the words "tax benefit" are so ambiguous that it's not clear what they mean, and the article never explains them, or mentions them again.

By the time a revised (and accurate) headline got slapped on the later-edition print issues -- "At GE on Tax Day, Billions of Reasons to Smile" -- the idea that the Times was saying that GE paid no U.S. income taxes and was getting a big refund was firmly implanted.
There's no need for me to publish a correction or clarification:
CNN anchor Jack Cafferty offers no clue as to how he calculates a "tax benefit" or what the term actually means.  My investigation suggests that he is misinterpreting and/or misrepresenting its meaning.  It appears to mean that a past write-off was recovered and had to be reported as income for the current tax year--which would increase the income tax if the company had demonstrated a net income.
At least Cafferty was in good company.  Props to Fortune and ProPublica for blowing the whistle on the broad application of Cafferty's error.  And a hat tip to Hot Air for putting me onto this story before the day lapsed.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

Grading PolitiFact: Rick Santorum and the aborted third (Updated)

To assess the truth for a numbers claim, the biggest factor is the underlying message.
--Bill Adair

The issue:



The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

The PolitiFact version of Rick Santorum's statement appears to provide adequate context:
"The Social Security system in my opinion is a flawed design, period," Santorum said in response to a question from a caller. "But having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends. The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion."
Judging by the context, Santorum is making the point that abortion has a substantial effect on national demographics to the point where it exposes a weakness of the Social Security system.  Despite the fact that the underlying message is the important thing about a numbers claim, once again we have an instance where PolitiFact simply ignores the most obvious underlying message in favor of something else.

In this case the numbers claim itself is the point along with a later nitpick about the extent to which abortions would affect population dynamics.

PolitiFact:
Live births: 4,090,007
Fetal deaths: 25,653
Abortions: 1,250,000

Total known pregnancies: 5,365,660

So abortions account for 23.2 percent of all known pregnancies. That’s less than a quarter of all pregnancies, rather than the one-third Santorum said.
One minor quibble with PolitiFact's equation:  Given Santorum's point that abortions affect population dynamics it makes sense to think he would discount fetal deaths since those occur regardless of elective abortion.  Subtracting fetal deaths boosts the percentage slightly to 23.4 percent.  The adjustment ends up moot since PolitiFact eventually uses a Guttmacher Institute publication's estimate of 22.4 percent.

So what of the "Truth-O-Meter"?

PolitiFact:
(W)e find Santorum is significantly overstating the frequency of abortions when he claims that "one in three pregnancies end in abortion" -- it’s actually in the 22 percent to 23 percent range.  That's less than one in four. And the effect on population would be even lower if women who had abortions had children later in life. We can't know exactly how that would affect the numbers, but it would send the estimate even lower. We rate Santorum's statement False.
The fact check indicates that Santorum inflated the abortion rate by about 50 percent.  That makes this fact check useful to me in graphing the way numerical inaccuracy affects the needle of the "Truth-O-Meter, except that PolitiFact uses two of the sentences in the concluding paragraph to comment on Santorum's inference regarding demographic effects.  Assuming that commentary has no effect on the objectivity of the Truth-O-Meter respecting the stated goal of the fact check, a figure inflated by approximately 50 percent may result in a "False" rating.

PolitiFact's nit-picking got me thinking.

If we're going to pay attention to stats like women having kids later in life, then why don't we pay attention to a few others?  Such as the fact that the abortion ratio for 2003 (as calculated by PolitiFact) and the abortion ratio for 2008 (as calculated by Guttmacher Institute researchers) do not determine the percentage of children missing because of abortion.  If 2003 is relevant then so is 2004.  Not to mention 2005.  In fact, Santorum might have some justification based on the expanded history of the abortion ratio.  The Guttmacher Institute found the ratio as high as 30.4 percent in 1983.  If even one third of each aborted group avoids abortion annually, a multiplier effect takes place over time.  The women who would have been born in 1980 have an opportunity to give birth later down the line, perhaps even to the point where Santorum underestimates the demographic effects of elective abortion.

I'm not going to argue that Santorum is entirely correct, nor will I suggest that Santorum had the factors I mentioned above in mind when he made his claim.  Performing a calculation reliably establishing that notion is beyond my ability, not to mention time-intensive.  In this context, it is sufficient to point out that PolitiFact entirely overlooked a fairly obvious part of the math that would positively affect Santorum's claim while giving emphasis to a far less significant point that negatively affects his claim.


April Fools?

By the time I reached this item for review, PolitiFact had given it an update:
UPDATE, April 1, 2011: After we published this item, a reader pointed out that the statement we quoted from Santorum’s office was incorrect. While a spokeswoman had told us that "the prolife community has been astounded at the increasing percentages in the pregnancies that result in abortion," the reader pointed us to statistics from the Guttmacher Institute that show the rate of abortions declining over time. From a 1981 peak of 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44, the rate has fallen, gradually but steadily, to 19.6 in 2008 -- a decline of about one-third. According to Census Bureau data, the raw number of abortions has also fallen consistently, from a peak of 1,609,000 in 1990 to 1,242,000 in 2006.
PolitiFact is either pretty careless or pulling an April Fools' Day joke.

It is true that the abortion ratio is on the decrease, making the comment from Santorum's office a bit perplexing.  But the number of abortions per 1,000 women (the rate of abortion) is not the same thing and that number is independent of the abortion ratio.  The same goes for the raw number of abortions.  A higher number of pregnancies can allow a higher raw number of abortions even if the abortion ratio drops.


The proper numbers to bring the comment from Santorum's office into question were there in the report. They were just ignored in favor of numbers that failed to support the objection.  Big oops.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F

The failures to focus reasonably on Santorum's underlying point and to take into account a major factor in support of Santorum's demographic inference justify the failing grades.  If I discover that the team was responsible for the botched update (and not kidding around with us) then the "journalists reporting badly" tag will apply.


Update (Fresh afters) April 4:

Though it remains true that reliably calculating the effect of abortion on a demographic over time is a complicated process best attempted by experts in the field, I programmed my own estimate just to illustrate the point about the cumulative effects of abortion done year after year.  It's an effect like compound interest but in reverse.

I used a fertility rate near the bottom of those recorded since the early 1970s (65 pregnancies in a year per 1,000 women aged 15-44).  I measured the effects over a 40 year period, roughly the length of time since Roe v. Wade made abortion generally legal in the United States.

Plugging an abortion ratio of 20 (200 abortions per 1,000 pregnancies annually) into my model, the control demographic (kids aged 0-10) fell by over 30 percent compared to zero abortions.

My reliance on conservative figures for purposes of my estimate suggests that Santorum would be very close and quite possibly low with his estimate over the time period since Roe v. Wade.  It would not make right his claim that one third of pregnancies end in abortion, of course.



April 3, 2011:  In the paragraph just prior to taking on PolitiFact's "nit-picking," corrected "100 percent" figure to match the previously used (correct) figure of 50 percent. 
April 4, 2011:  Restored the explanation for the difference between abortion ratios, rates and raw abortions as used in the Guttmacher report.  Not sure how it got cut out in the first place, but there you have it. Also fixed a redundancy in my opening paragraph.

Friday, April 01, 2011

PolitiFlub: False assumptions equal true foundations

The PolitiFlub label exists for times when I don't intend a full evaluation but nonetheless have found something worth criticizing in a PolitiFact story.

Such as this one.

Sometimes I don't know whether laugh, stare or simply fall out of my chair:
When we ran the White House's approach by Boehner's office, a spokesman said that they're based on a faulty assumption -- that the Boehner proposal would institute identical, across-the-board cuts for every department and program. In fact, the spokesman said, the proposal would be to set the entire discretionary budget to 2008 levels and then negotiate cuts in each program to meet that target.

That's all well and good, but the fact is that Boehner's news release doesn't explain exactly how its cuts would be made. So, given the information available, we think it's reasonable for Axelrod to have based his claim on an across-the-board cut. Moreover, if Boehner's office is suggesting that under his proposal, the cuts in education could in fact be less than 20 percent, then by the same logic they could also end up higher than 20 percent.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, PolitiFact just informed you that, in the context of a fact check, it is reasonable for David Axelrod to make a false assumption where the available information does not directly forbid the assumption.

I suppose this is the type of fallacious reasoning we should expect from a fact check organization that has as one of its principles the notion that the failure of a subject to substantiate their claim amounts to a failure to meet the burden of proof and can justify a "False" rating on the "Truth-O-Meter."

Blech.